When a user sends an email, the avatar and attachments are broken. Avatars are default with their first name initial being the avatar. [image] [image]

or can we disable Avatars in emails?

[image] Jared_Needell: Why isn’t discourse emails setup properly to attach images to emails rather than using links from a server Because inline images in HTML emails are not sent as attachments, they’re sent as references that must be addressable network resources. Doing such might be possible (?) but it is by no means would be a standard solution. Google might have a way to avoid caching in their clients; I’m not sure but some searching would turn up a method if it exists.

So switching to S3 will fix the actually files but not the avatars?

[image] Jared_Needell: So switching to S3 will fix the actually files but not the avatars? I would imagine so, but remember, if you’re storing things on S3, those are publicly available, so you should consider the security risk if your internal server hosting something sensitive (particularly topic attachments!). I think Discourse caches all profile photos, even those served up by Gravatar, so not sure how you could resolve that other than by using a different email client. :slight_smile:

Yeah I’m aware of those risks, I’ll have to bring it up with the rest of my team to see if we need to consider killing off file uploads. There is an option to disable caching uploaded avatars but my issue is the letter avatars that are default. Can discourse provide any insight on disabling avatars in emails or assistance with getting avatars working?

Is your external system avatars enabled site setting enabled? I don’t use this myself so can’t say exactly how it works, but I’d assumed that would load the letter-based avatars from some external CDN that Discourse.org runs…

[image] Jared_Needell: Google Apps puts some sort of CDN link in front of the image urls and Google can’t talk to my discourse server A quick Google search came up with this result; which I assume you’ve already read and tried? “Set up an image URL proxy whitelist” Set up an image URL proxy allowlist | Gmail | Google Workspace Help

I actually haven’t, I’ll check this out thanks. As for the external system, I do have it checked but the URL is still an internal link URL.

[image] Jared_Needell: As for the external system, I do have it checked but the URL is still an internal link URL. Right, by default for self-installs it sets the letter avatar urls to /letter_avatar_proxy which nginx proxies to avatars.discourse.org so that the server IP is revealed instead of all your visitors’. (Though note that the IPs are not stored or logged anyways.) You can switch by changing the url format to replace /letter_avatar_proxy/ with https://avatars.discourse.org/ .

Images broken in emails due to Discourse being behind a private firewall

Product Support

Jared_Needell (Jared Needell) April 25, 2016, 10:49pm 16

I updated the url format and the avatars in emails are still trying to download the avatar image from my server rather than discourse.

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Images broken in emails due to Discourse being behind a private firewall

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